I asked once why AMI had such awful color schemes in their old BIOSes , someone replied they made that like that so they would look good on monochrome monitors. This actually makes sense for many old software with crazy color schemes as back then most people had mono monitors...

The crazy color schemes were culturally appropriate for the time too, I haven't heard complaints about the textmode bios colors until this very thread

Maybe that's because people don't spend too much time on BIOS. If you use that color scheme in other context (i.e.: a spreadsheet) you'll hear more complains.

CGA magenta/cyan mode is terrible. Don't even imagine what LSD user could to create it as standard and why some games used it.

2nd place
Commodore 64 ugly palette

Bronze one
When in EGA mode red color was used as skin tone

Can't really say the C64 palette is that ugly, considering the designers of the VIC-II chip basically picked their favourite colours and the opposites of each.

When CGA was being designed nobody used IBM PCs for games. It was intended for office/business graphics: bar charts, pie charts, that sort of thing. Games were an afterthought.

I've always hated the 16-color system palette in Windows 3.x. It's like the 16 CGA colors made even harsher, less useful and more ZX Spectrum-like.

(There may have been some logic behind it, since the Windows display system was designed for device independence, and had to handle graphics with arbitrary bit-depths; these 16 colors are somewhat strategically placed within the RGB color space, which maintains accuracy when using ordered dithering to render a higher-color image. Still a butt-ugly palette.)

However, the worst "color scheme" by far (if you can call it that) is the retarded present-day imperative of blinding you with harsh white backgrounds on anything and everything -- to the point that people have learned to expect them, and even react negatively when they're absent. It's been decades since they came up with the "desktop metaphor", and nobody's figured out yet that light-emitting displays are not paper.

VileRancour wrote:

However, the worst "color scheme" by far (if you can call it that) is the retarded present-day imperative of blinding you with harsh white backgrounds on anything and everything -- to the point that people have learned to expect them, and even react negatively when they're absent. It's been decades since they came up with the "desktop metaphor", and nobody's figured out yet that light-emitting displays are not paper.

OMG this. I rue the time when most of the internet switched from light-text-on-black to black-text-on-blaring-white seemingly overnight (around 1999~2000.) Now you do anything in bright-on-black and the mob of Old Men with Bad Eyes will start bitching at you to no end like it's something *wrong*.

Some Linux apps (Ocular, KWrite, etc.) have an 'invert colors' option and you used to be able to get an extension for Old Opera that would do it & remember your settings on a per-page basis. VERY useful.

Errius wrote:

When CGA was being designed nobody used IBM PCs for games. It was intended for office/business graphics: bar charts, pie charts, that sort of thing. Games were an afterthought.

magenta/cyan mode is terrible for anything, except LSD trips

xjas wrote:

Pretty sure that one was designed to be awful as a little poke in the ribs to TSP. But yeah, yick. 😜

Worst one I've had to deal with lately, the "classic" AMI bios scheme, seen here on my 386 board. Who at AMI approved this? Who looked at it and thought it was a good idea??

The explanation is easy: The BIOS defaults to a color scheme that is very well visible on monochrome screens. If you press F2 you can switch to the grey/black/blue color scheme that is meant for color displays.
So the scheme you show should be seen on a monochrome display. The actual color display scheme is imho quite good in the AMI BIOS: